With the world's fast-growing adoption of Internet-enabled everyday products, the business-to-business market for the "Internet of Things" (IoT) is exploding. The Berlin-based IOTA Foundation, which is behind a namesake virtual currency that's designed specifically for the rising IoT industry, is delving into data monetization and solutions with the Tuesday morning launch of a new micropayment-based data marketplace that's powered by distributed ledger technology. According to the release, examples of available data include location-specific environmental data, African agricultural data and anonymized healthcare data from wearables. The token's defining feature is its “tangle”-based distributed ledger technology for storing transactions, used in lieu of the blockchain technology that underlies most cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin and Ether. It's this decentralized permissionless ledger, where the data will be hosted, that will ensure the data being sold on IOTA's marketplace is tamper-proof.

Source: Forbes November 28, 2017 14:03 UTC